That's some fine problem solving, albeit not the problems the prison wanted to be solved.
I sometimes wonder if these sorts of people who "succeed" in these odd ways on the wrong side of the criminal fence, would have had rather successful careers had just a couple of things gone differently towards the start of their life.
This is the other side of the coin of Uber violating state and local regulations for the better part of a decade to get their business off the ground or HSBC laundering money for the cartels.
I've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught."
I'm not sure how true that is but what I do believe is that the following is 100% true:
- smart people
- who grow up in disadvantaged locales
- and have emotional trauma due to the above
- may end up in a life of crime and then prison
How do I know this? I've worked with a couple people like this. Some ended up in prison, others almost went to prison and later on went to work in corporate America (no sarcasm intended here).
>"smart people - who grow up in disadvantaged locales - and have emotional trauma due to the above - may end up in a life of crime and then prison"
I believe this to be true and some of my former schoolmates who were brilliant IQ wise and got high marks on math and physics still ended up in jails. Some were later able to recover and lead more productive life
Crime is also just more accepted in "disadvantaged locales."
Drinking openly is illegal in most of Mexico and the USA. If the area is run down and the shops are broken I will crack open a beer on the street without a second thought. I wouldn't think of doing it openly in some yuppie neighborhood where some Karen will rat your ass out in 5 minutes.
>I've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught."
This includes white collar crime and all kinds of non-violent crimes though.
>Hmm, what would make you assume perpetrators of violent crimes would have a different IQ level than other crimes?
For starters there's the lead exposure relation to violent crime, that is accepted as a factor, and which is also known to lower IQ.
That lead-affected criminal population would drive average violent criminal IQ down, even if the lead exposure worked through a different causual mechanism and lower IQ was just an orthogonal effect.
Besides several studies have found the general correlation.
>My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.
Choice of outlet for the outburst, impulse control and other factors however are related to intelligence.
Besides you're just covering "crimes of passion" here. There are career criminals doing homicides, gang shootings, etc, plus physical violence unrelated to passion, but related to intimidation, theft, etc.
Higher IQ would correlate with an increased ability to predict the consequences of one’s actions. “If I stab this person I will go to prison” versus “if I stab this person everyone will think I’m great because that person sucks.”
The extra line supposes that being smart reduces the chances of getting caught.
Which from what I gather isn't very true - being smart can often lead to over confidence and making mistakes, and also a lot of crime is not premeditated.
Or being disliked by a DoJ who can pressure a judge (who's other legal experience is being a career prosecutor for the feds as well) to not allow many forms of defense, while expending millions upon millions of their own money and "expert witnesses" to tell lies that you can't afford to defend against, and if you will only sign on the dotted line you will only get 3 years instead of a gazillion.
This is how they got Samourai Wallet guy to admit to "operating an unlicensed money transmitter" business despite FINCen saying he wasn't even a money transmitter which means how would he even get a license?
Likewise a lot of crime isn’t “crime” at all. Kill someone by putting lead in their lungs by means of a firearm and we call it murder and you go to prison. Do it by dumping lead into the air from your factory smokestack and we call it business and you get rich.
Some people really activate their brains once they get locked up. The things I've seen people construct from literal garbage in prison. Tattoo guns are a popular one. Obviously half the population has a way of making some sort of device analogous to a car cigarette lighter in prison by finding staples, bits of wire, foil etc that they can stick in a 110V outlet to heat up and light their drugs from. Necessity really is the mother of invention.
A friend and I got split up into different cell blocks because we were helping each other with litigation. Knowing this would happen we'd come up with a way to communicate across the facility. We had these 5x5 grids of letters, no "K", where 11 on the grid was A, 15 was E, 55 was Z etc. They had these touchscreen commissary kiosks where you could order food. The quantity of each item allowed up to 4 digits, e.g. 9999. So that gives you two letters. 1121 = AF for instance. We'd start at the top, Beef Noodles, 1121. Chicken Noodles, 2412 etc and work through the menu. We shared our login IDs with each other. We'd place these huge orders into the cart but never checkout. Then we'd log in to each other's accts from our separate cell blocks multiple times a day, read our messages and write our replies. Got caught eventually, 10 days in the Hole. I FOIA'd their investigation and it was very amusing seeing the report from the facility "Intelligence Dept" trying to decode all the messages.
Incarcerated people have the right to sue, right? They have right to appeal. Prisons shouldn't be able to interfere with prisoner's rights, specially when it's about suing the prison itself.
The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with approximately 541 to 614 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents as of 2022–2026. While representing only 5% of the global population, the US holds roughly 20% of the world's prisoners, totalling over 1.8 million people.
For many crimes, the U.S. loves giving eye watering long sentences for offences that would result in a tenth of the prison time in other countries.
Yes, especially when it is civil rights litigation, e.g. facility conditions. They will do everything within their disposal to interfere with litigation. A lot of county facilities in the USA will retain private counsel, not government lawyers, for these kinds of cases, and it is enormously expensive. I can remember one case where they took a newspaper from a prisoner and he sued, and the jail took it to trial and lost and had to pay not only damages of $15K, but also their legal fees, which were somewhere around $1.5m, but also the plaintiff's counsel, which was another $900K IIRC.
I read ‘helping the litigation’ to mean they both may have been involved in the same crime, and they mean to stop collusion after the fact, before trial concludes?
Both ways. Mostly it is just helping with the legal process. Rarely is it a multi-plaintiff case as the courts don't like those from prisoners. It causes too many logistical nightmares. How are two plaintiffs to communicate their wishes to each other on how to proceed? How will they both appear in court together if they are in different buildings or even different institutions?
I remember being on one join-plaintiff civil rights case and the government lawyer told the judge they were going to criminally charge me with impersonating a lawyer as I "must have given legal advice to the other plaintiff." The judge asked how they thought the complaint was written. "As I see it, one plaintiff must have pressed one key, then the other plaintiff pressed the next key on the keyboard. That is our belief."
Prison IQ is a very different distribution. As I recall, the top 2% IQ of the general population makes up something like 20% of the prison population. You also have quite a few at the other end.
The gifted are more over represented in prison then black males, however, most of those gifted are themselves minorities.
I’ll have to see some evidence on that, in my search it’s basically a normal bell curve shifted 8 pts down. The idea that 130+ IQ individuals make up 1/5th of the prison population does not pass the sniff test, that would be a crazy statistical aberration. In my search I found reports that 130+ IQ individuals only represent less than 0.4% of the prison population.
Roughly yes, it is declining. The Flynn effect was just smart people having kids later which has now normalized and reversed (with smart people having fewer kids).
You'd be incorrect. It's been well established that lower IQ is moderately associated with higher rates of criminality.
I have no comment on whether C-suite types commit more crimes than prisoners, but I'd wager they don't.
Not everyone in jail got busted for benign stuff like selling a joint. There are lots and lots of incarcerated murderers, rapists, fraudsters, drunk drivers, etc.
I wonder about the IQ distribution in mental health facilities. The mental health system is basically a penal system in white coats.
My parents often pointed out a very tall bearded homeless man who would stand in the intersection and shout at cars. They called him “Bigfoot”. Mom explained that he had multiple college degrees, such as physics, and indicated that he was a waste of a life.
Maybe he realized screaming at cars was more productive than being an actuary so someone who inherited their way through Yale and Blackrock could make the world a worse place.
Parent meant that almost no white collar crime gets prosecuted or results in jail time for defendants. Which is a very fair statement to.make, no conspiracy involved.
The claim is that the makeup of the prison population would be different if the law was as expeditive and indiscriminate with the well-to-do as it is with the poor: the entirety of Enron in prison, of VW, of Uber, etc.
Your correlation is by and large about criminality among the poor. It would still probably hold in the above scenario, but you can't claim it looks at "criminality" full stop.
> Not everyone in jail got busted for benign stuff like selling a joint. There are lots and lots of incarcerated murderers, rapists, fraudsters, drunk drivers, etc.
In US federal prisons, drug offenders make up over 40% of the total population, by very far the largest group. The next largest tracked category, "Weapons, Explosives, and Arson" is 23%. [0]
Granted, these are almost entirely US federal offenses, which have of course been flux throughout US history with respect to proper authority, and drug offenses have tended to grease the wheels of jurisprudence so as to be regarded constitutional (albeit with a very inconsistent set of underlying principles). Murder for example is not generally a violation of federal law absent (a fairly long list of) special circumstances.
I do not believe there is any state where the number of people incarcerated for fraud convictions is in the same order of magnitude as drug convictions. In Ohio, where this story takes place, drug offenders are about 14% of the population while "fraudsters" are about 1%.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assert that a significant portion of prisons in the USA are convicted of offenses that are not easy to understand as a moral affront to society or an infringement on the rights of anyone else.
The weapons offenses are by a longshot "felon in possession of a firearm." That one is crazy to me. You're going to send people out into the free world, where guns are legal, and owning a gun is legal, and they are supposedly off the books, and then just tempt them with owning something to defend themselves that everyone around them already has but then lock them away for a decade for doing so? Obviously most of the drug ones are just as absurd -- you're locking up drug dealer A who is immediately replaced with drug dealer B with absolutely no change to drug operations or consumption but at great expense to yourself. Thankfully we've pretty much stopped putting drug users in federal prison.
You could probably wipe out over half the federal prisons without any real change to greater society.
Go to your local county jail lockup, by far the most common charge is driving on a suspended license - because many crimes will get your license suspended as a matter of course, and others will give you payment plans and paperwork filing dates and if you aren't on top of everything well enough you will get suspended for missing a payment or failing to submit your stuff properly, then enjoy violating probation with an additional misdemeanor, impound fees, court fees, and possible jail time.
>"C-suite types commit more crimes than prisoners, but I'd wager they don't."
On behalf / or covered by corporations they openly do things for which any normal person would be criminally charged and put behind bars. Wake me up when people who for example were involved in Bradley development scandal are punished. Or ones involved in DuPont PFOA contamination case etc. etc. So they do have criminal mind. They just know they would personally get away with it and in a worst case the corporations get fined.
"For the little stealing, they give you prison, soon or late. For the big stealing, they names you emperor, and puts you in the hall of fame when you croaks. If there's one thing I've learned from from twenty years on the Pullman cars listening to the white quality talk, it's dat same fact."
some simply wanna be Pablo Escobar and become a reggaeton poster child. they don't do it for other reason than become their mental image of a gangster.
yes, they are intelligent but they insist and insist into do what they consider cool, and that coolness come to be a "hacker" or a criminal
so far from top of my mind I remember a serial corporate scammer, a social media middle man who constantly sell access to people working in meta (unlocking/locking accounts), a drug precursor middlewoman, a money laundering mule/scammer/errand boy. every time it was the same. they wanted to show a gangster luxury life in ig. the middlewoman was something else, never got to understand her. 60 years. probably she was just for the thrill of it.
had they opportunities to do something else? repeatedly. specially after prison or with family help. but they refuse, the next business will be the one. they will become millionaires for sure. jail again.
There's a guy by the name of Michael Lacey who is popular in Tiktok under the name Comrade Sinque [1]. He spent 21 years in prison. It was a much longer sentence. I'm not sure what happened to get him out much earlier.
What was his crime? Felony murder. Sounds bad, right? So what were the details. At age 19 he and a friend burgled a house. The homeowner killed his friend. That was it.
Many Americans don't realize how this works and how insanely unjust it is. It's called the felony murder doctrine and it is unique to the US. It means that if a felony is being commited and if anyone dies then you, as the felon, can be charged with murder regardless of how they died. In states like Alabama, all burglaries are felonies. So if you and a friend break into a house, the police respond and kill your friend, you can get convicted of murder and sentenced to 30-years in prison.
Not a made up example [2].
Anyway, Comrade Sinque is better read than probably at least 95% of Americans. He is thoughtful and intelligent. He wasn't born a criminal (that's 18th century thinking). He's certainly not low IQ (as some would have you believe criminals all are). No, the issue is material conditions. Poverty and a lack of opportunity.
We probably spent about $1 million convicting and incarcerating him for 21 years. This doesn't really seem like a good investment.
Convictions/punishment is also meant to be a deterrent.
That one being: don't rob a house in a state with a castle doctrine where the owner is allowed to fucking kill you. If you first hand help someone get killed, you're at fault. Sounds reasonable.
But, I also wish we had far far more deterrents, and far more deaths, when it comes to robbers.
The uS has 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prison population. We have a higher rate of incarceration than, say, Russia or Iran [1].
If deterrants worked, why do these incidents keep happening? Why isn't this the safest country on Earth?
Poverty costs all of us but rather than lifting people out of poverty, we'd rather spend way more on the prison-industrial complex, slavery 2.0 (ie convict leasing) and law enforcement.
Look at the low numbers in Africa. Is it because they elevate their criminals out of poverty? Maybe their police have good relationships with the community? Maybe they're good at re-habilitating convicted criminals in prison? Or maybe it's counseling to heal generational trauma?
Obviously, stoning all the criminals isn't the solution, but having society rigidly define acceptable bounds of behavior that get you removed from that society if crossed (temporarily or permanently), isn't unreasonable.
To understand that high number in the US, I think you would have to look at who is in prison, and what they did, to understand. Good luck. They collect the data in a way so you can't do a multivariate analysis, because that would be unethical!
I don't know, we would have to look at the data. Again, due to ethical concerns, they don't record or report the data in a way where more meaningful conclusions can be made.
I think many many things contribute to the difference in imprisonment.
But, federal imprisonment is 42% drug charges [1]. Just looking at that, US has a cartel run country, with a near 20% GDP based on drug trafficking [2], at its poorly controlled border, with a whole continent below that containing exactly zero first world countries, some having > 40% GDP from drug trafficking! I've walked across the Mexican border. I've seen caravans of cars driving across. It's near fiction. Now, try to smuggle some drugs into an inner European country! Or, alternatively, just hop over to Amsterdam to avoid your countries laws. And, we also have the benefit of corporations fueling drug epidemics [3]. Is that imprisonment a deterrent? I didn't look up numbers, but have some useless anecdotal evidence: I knew two drug dealers in high school. They both stopped because their buddies were arrested, and lives ruined.
For direct evidence to answer the question "is punishment a deterrent" (I find it hard to believe this is an argument), see California Prop 47 [4].
I mostly think the US system is too punitive, but I don’t see a problem here. Someone died because of what he did. He did it deliberately and the death was a foreseeable outcome of what he did. I’m not too upset that he spent two decades in prison as a result.
I've been told by someone who'd been in jail a lot, that attorney-client privilege is a huge loophole in the prison smuggling economy and someone in prison asking if you know "a good lawyer" is asking for a lawyer who would be willing to smuggle in contraband during privileged meetings.
Their thinking is that making the conditions bad will serve as deterrent i.e. would-be criminals would think twice before committing crimes because they're scared of going to prison.
Of course, this makes no sense, as most criminals have low impulse control and don't think about the consequences of their actions in terms of risk/reward calculations. We should use prison time to re-educate these people and try to make them better instead of psychologically torturing them, but here we are, and it's very unlikely things can change within the current political system (too many "checks and balances" for meaningful reforms)
>Of course, this makes no sense, as most criminals have low impulse control and don't think about the consequences of their actions in terms of risk/reward calculations.
Also there are decades and decades of this idea not working out at all...
They had computers in one place I was in, but not connected to the Net, just for doing some basic word processing and typing tutorials.
I found the C# compiler that is hidden several levels deep by default in the Windows directory and decided to teach the other prisoners how to code. I needed some reference materials as it's really hard when you have no docs and literally just the compiler. They don't allow computer books in most places "for security reasons", but a very elderly nun took pity on me and asked me what I wanted. I told her "C# Weekend Crash Course" (I wasn't a C# dev at the time and it was the only title I could think of) and she bought it off Amazon and smuggled in not only the book but the CD-ROM that came with it, bless her. I managed to teach the guys how to write text adventures which they enjoyed. I couldn't think of what else fun I could get them to do with only console text in/out.
I wish I'd had a bunch of those BASIC programming books from the 8-bit home computer era, they had a ton of fun games based only on simple console input and output.
Well, Scoundrel/Donsol it's a game that can be run with just a deck of cards, and porting it to
C# it's a trivial task from ANSI C with simple arithmetic:
Maybe you're passing the sentence incorrectly. Could be, "They found software about making drugs/explosives, pornography about making drugs/explosives, and articles about making drugs/explosives".
Free roam games in a prison would be highly praised, even if they were dumb Pokémon roms or really old GTA releases.
Or just give them long gamebooks -not necesarily fantasy themed- a la CYOA but with pencils and erasers (and, yes, they can be turned into a weapon, but inmates will use for paperwork or prison classes anyway).
Some of them allow you to roam under a whole city and solve enigmas/puzzles and fight.
I fear that "opportunities for offenders to participate in meaningful and rehabilitative programming" probably does not mean programming. It's the prisoners who get programmed.
Anonbrit | 12 hours ago
cwillu | 12 hours ago
Quarrelsome | 12 hours ago
I sometimes wonder if these sorts of people who "succeed" in these odd ways on the wrong side of the criminal fence, would have had rather successful careers had just a couple of things gone differently towards the start of their life.
AngryData | 11 hours ago
roughly | 11 hours ago
alexpotato | 11 hours ago
I'm not sure how true that is but what I do believe is that the following is 100% true:
- smart people - who grow up in disadvantaged locales - and have emotional trauma due to the above - may end up in a life of crime and then prison
How do I know this? I've worked with a couple people like this. Some ended up in prison, others almost went to prison and later on went to work in corporate America (no sarcasm intended here).
FpUser | 10 hours ago
I believe this to be true and some of my former schoolmates who were brilliant IQ wise and got high marks on math and physics still ended up in jails. Some were later able to recover and lead more productive life
mothballed | 10 hours ago
Drinking openly is illegal in most of Mexico and the USA. If the area is run down and the shops are broken I will crack open a beer on the street without a second thought. I wouldn't think of doing it openly in some yuppie neighborhood where some Karen will rat your ass out in 5 minutes.
shmeeed | 2 hours ago
coldtea | 10 hours ago
This includes white collar crime and all kinds of non-violent crimes though.
Is it the same for the violent crime subset?
jcgrillo | 10 hours ago
cortesoft | 10 hours ago
My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.
coldtea | 10 hours ago
For starters there's the lead exposure relation to violent crime, that is accepted as a factor, and which is also known to lower IQ.
That lead-affected criminal population would drive average violent criminal IQ down, even if the lead exposure worked through a different causual mechanism and lower IQ was just an orthogonal effect.
Besides several studies have found the general correlation.
>My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.
Choice of outlet for the outburst, impulse control and other factors however are related to intelligence.
Besides you're just covering "crimes of passion" here. There are career criminals doing homicides, gang shootings, etc, plus physical violence unrelated to passion, but related to intimidation, theft, etc.
conradev | 9 hours ago
9x39 | 9 hours ago
Example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
wat10000 | 8 hours ago
Melatonic | 3 hours ago
Illniyar | 10 hours ago
Which from what I gather isn't very true - being smart can often lead to over confidence and making mistakes, and also a lot of crime is not premeditated.
kdhaskjdhadjk | 10 hours ago
mothballed | 10 hours ago
This is how they got Samourai Wallet guy to admit to "operating an unlicensed money transmitter" business despite FINCen saying he wasn't even a money transmitter which means how would he even get a license?
jamilton | 8 hours ago
kdhaskjdhadjk | 8 hours ago
wat10000 | 8 hours ago
card_zero | 20 minutes ago
wat10000 | 8 hours ago
RealityVoid | 6 hours ago
Yes, that is what the law is, by definition. A reduction in freedom. Most times, for very good reason.
qingcharles | 9 hours ago
A friend and I got split up into different cell blocks because we were helping each other with litigation. Knowing this would happen we'd come up with a way to communicate across the facility. We had these 5x5 grids of letters, no "K", where 11 on the grid was A, 15 was E, 55 was Z etc. They had these touchscreen commissary kiosks where you could order food. The quantity of each item allowed up to 4 digits, e.g. 9999. So that gives you two letters. 1121 = AF for instance. We'd start at the top, Beef Noodles, 1121. Chicken Noodles, 2412 etc and work through the menu. We shared our login IDs with each other. We'd place these huge orders into the cart but never checkout. Then we'd log in to each other's accts from our separate cell blocks multiple times a day, read our messages and write our replies. Got caught eventually, 10 days in the Hole. I FOIA'd their investigation and it was very amusing seeing the report from the facility "Intelligence Dept" trying to decode all the messages.
nextaccountic | 8 hours ago
Are they legally able to prevent inmates from helping the litigation of another? That's insane
The US is not a free society
gruez | 8 hours ago
It's prison for a reason?
kdhaskjdhadjk | 8 hours ago
nextaccountic | 6 hours ago
kelseydh | 8 hours ago
For many crimes, the U.S. loves giving eye watering long sentences for offences that would result in a tenth of the prison time in other countries.
qingcharles | 8 hours ago
dnemmers | 8 hours ago
qingcharles | 8 hours ago
I remember being on one join-plaintiff civil rights case and the government lawyer told the judge they were going to criminally charge me with impersonating a lawyer as I "must have given legal advice to the other plaintiff." The judge asked how they thought the complaint was written. "As I see it, one plaintiff must have pressed one key, then the other plaintiff pressed the next key on the keyboard. That is our belief."
cjbgkagh | 9 hours ago
Enginerrrd | 7 hours ago
The gifted are more over represented in prison then black males, however, most of those gifted are themselves minorities.
cjbgkagh | 7 hours ago
LAC-Tech | 7 hours ago
cjbgkagh | 7 hours ago
throwawaymobule | 4 hours ago
Grimblewald | 11 hours ago
stackghost | 11 hours ago
I have no comment on whether C-suite types commit more crimes than prisoners, but I'd wager they don't.
Not everyone in jail got busted for benign stuff like selling a joint. There are lots and lots of incarcerated murderers, rapists, fraudsters, drunk drivers, etc.
ButlerianJihad | 11 hours ago
My parents often pointed out a very tall bearded homeless man who would stand in the intersection and shout at cars. They called him “Bigfoot”. Mom explained that he had multiple college degrees, such as physics, and indicated that he was a waste of a life.
Avicebron | 10 hours ago
coldtea | 10 hours ago
Consider who is doing the "establishing" and what criminality they ignore because those doing it do not even go to prison or jail 99% of time.
stackghost | 10 hours ago
Ah yes, I'm sure it's just a conspiracy to keep brilliant people in prison, and let stupid CEOs off the hook.
Look, a quick jaunt through my comment history will show you I'm no corporate bootlicker but this is ridiculous.
coldtea | 10 hours ago
kdhaskjdhadjk | 10 hours ago
constantius | 4 hours ago
The claim is that the makeup of the prison population would be different if the law was as expeditive and indiscriminate with the well-to-do as it is with the poor: the entirety of Enron in prison, of VW, of Uber, etc.
Your correlation is by and large about criminality among the poor. It would still probably hold in the above scenario, but you can't claim it looks at "criminality" full stop.
jMyles | 10 hours ago
In US federal prisons, drug offenders make up over 40% of the total population, by very far the largest group. The next largest tracked category, "Weapons, Explosives, and Arson" is 23%. [0]
Granted, these are almost entirely US federal offenses, which have of course been flux throughout US history with respect to proper authority, and drug offenses have tended to grease the wheels of jurisprudence so as to be regarded constitutional (albeit with a very inconsistent set of underlying principles). Murder for example is not generally a violation of federal law absent (a fairly long list of) special circumstances.
I do not believe there is any state where the number of people incarcerated for fraud convictions is in the same order of magnitude as drug convictions. In Ohio, where this story takes place, drug offenders are about 14% of the population while "fraudsters" are about 1%.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assert that a significant portion of prisons in the USA are convicted of offenses that are not easy to understand as a moral affront to society or an infringement on the rights of anyone else.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
stackghost | 10 hours ago
Drug crimes are still crimes, irrespective of public opinion.
mothballed | 10 hours ago
You could probably wipe out over half the federal prisons without any real change to greater society.
t-3 | 9 hours ago
FpUser | 10 hours ago
On behalf / or covered by corporations they openly do things for which any normal person would be criminally charged and put behind bars. Wake me up when people who for example were involved in Bradley development scandal are punished. Or ones involved in DuPont PFOA contamination case etc. etc. So they do have criminal mind. They just know they would personally get away with it and in a worst case the corporations get fined.
AnimalMuppet | 10 hours ago
From "The Emperor Jones", quoted from memory.
Geezus_42 | 8 hours ago
hackable_sand | 10 hours ago
You guys just can't let go
itsthecourier | 10 hours ago
some simply wanna be Pablo Escobar and become a reggaeton poster child. they don't do it for other reason than become their mental image of a gangster.
yes, they are intelligent but they insist and insist into do what they consider cool, and that coolness come to be a "hacker" or a criminal
so far from top of my mind I remember a serial corporate scammer, a social media middle man who constantly sell access to people working in meta (unlocking/locking accounts), a drug precursor middlewoman, a money laundering mule/scammer/errand boy. every time it was the same. they wanted to show a gangster luxury life in ig. the middlewoman was something else, never got to understand her. 60 years. probably she was just for the thrill of it.
had they opportunities to do something else? repeatedly. specially after prison or with family help. but they refuse, the next business will be the one. they will become millionaires for sure. jail again.
jmyeet | 8 hours ago
There's a guy by the name of Michael Lacey who is popular in Tiktok under the name Comrade Sinque [1]. He spent 21 years in prison. It was a much longer sentence. I'm not sure what happened to get him out much earlier.
What was his crime? Felony murder. Sounds bad, right? So what were the details. At age 19 he and a friend burgled a house. The homeowner killed his friend. That was it.
Many Americans don't realize how this works and how insanely unjust it is. It's called the felony murder doctrine and it is unique to the US. It means that if a felony is being commited and if anyone dies then you, as the felon, can be charged with murder regardless of how they died. In states like Alabama, all burglaries are felonies. So if you and a friend break into a house, the police respond and kill your friend, you can get convicted of murder and sentenced to 30-years in prison.
Not a made up example [2].
Anyway, Comrade Sinque is better read than probably at least 95% of Americans. He is thoughtful and intelligent. He wasn't born a criminal (that's 18th century thinking). He's certainly not low IQ (as some would have you believe criminals all are). No, the issue is material conditions. Poverty and a lack of opportunity.
We probably spent about $1 million convicting and incarcerating him for 21 years. This doesn't really seem like a good investment.
[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@comrade_sinque
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/felony-murder-officer-shooting-al...
nomel | 8 hours ago
That one being: don't rob a house in a state with a castle doctrine where the owner is allowed to fucking kill you. If you first hand help someone get killed, you're at fault. Sounds reasonable.
But, I also wish we had far far more deterrents, and far more deaths, when it comes to robbers.
jmyeet | 8 hours ago
If deterrants worked, why do these incidents keep happening? Why isn't this the safest country on Earth?
Poverty costs all of us but rather than lifting people out of poverty, we'd rather spend way more on the prison-industrial complex, slavery 2.0 (ie convict leasing) and law enforcement.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
nomel | 8 hours ago
Look at the low numbers in Africa. Is it because they elevate their criminals out of poverty? Maybe their police have good relationships with the community? Maybe they're good at re-habilitating convicted criminals in prison? Or maybe it's counseling to heal generational trauma?
Nope. Strong deterrent of immediate mob justice: https://www.dw.com/en/mob-justice-in-africa-why-people-take-...
Obviously, stoning all the criminals isn't the solution, but having society rigidly define acceptable bounds of behavior that get you removed from that society if crossed (temporarily or permanently), isn't unreasonable.
To understand that high number in the US, I think you would have to look at who is in prison, and what they did, to understand. Good luck. They collect the data in a way so you can't do a multivariate analysis, because that would be unethical!
dullcrisp | 7 hours ago
nomel | 6 hours ago
I think many many things contribute to the difference in imprisonment.
But, federal imprisonment is 42% drug charges [1]. Just looking at that, US has a cartel run country, with a near 20% GDP based on drug trafficking [2], at its poorly controlled border, with a whole continent below that containing exactly zero first world countries, some having > 40% GDP from drug trafficking! I've walked across the Mexican border. I've seen caravans of cars driving across. It's near fiction. Now, try to smuggle some drugs into an inner European country! Or, alternatively, just hop over to Amsterdam to avoid your countries laws. And, we also have the benefit of corporations fueling drug epidemics [3]. Is that imprisonment a deterrent? I didn't look up numbers, but have some useless anecdotal evidence: I knew two drug dealers in high school. They both stopped because their buddies were arrested, and lives ruined.
For direct evidence to answer the question "is punishment a deterrent" (I find it hard to believe this is an argument), see California Prop 47 [4].
[1] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
[2] https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2023-09-21/f...
[3] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...
[4] https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/prop-47-36-califor...
wat10000 | 8 hours ago
948382828528 | 5 hours ago
jzemeocala | 6 hours ago
t1234s | 12 hours ago
markus_zhang | 12 hours ago
tetrisgm | 11 hours ago
codezero | 11 hours ago
eucyclos | 10 hours ago
b00ty4breakfast | 11 hours ago
jldugger | 11 hours ago
dang | 7 hours ago
Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093970 - April 2017 (188 comments)
coldtea | 10 hours ago
What is with this BS idea of medieval jail conditions...
glerk | 9 hours ago
Of course, this makes no sense, as most criminals have low impulse control and don't think about the consequences of their actions in terms of risk/reward calculations. We should use prison time to re-educate these people and try to make them better instead of psychologically torturing them, but here we are, and it's very unlikely things can change within the current political system (too many "checks and balances" for meaningful reforms)
queenkjuul | 8 hours ago
coldtea | 2 hours ago
Also there are decades and decades of this idea not working out at all...
qingcharles | 9 hours ago
I found the C# compiler that is hidden several levels deep by default in the Windows directory and decided to teach the other prisoners how to code. I needed some reference materials as it's really hard when you have no docs and literally just the compiler. They don't allow computer books in most places "for security reasons", but a very elderly nun took pity on me and asked me what I wanted. I told her "C# Weekend Crash Course" (I wasn't a C# dev at the time and it was the only title I could think of) and she bought it off Amazon and smuggled in not only the book but the CD-ROM that came with it, bless her. I managed to teach the guys how to write text adventures which they enjoyed. I couldn't think of what else fun I could get them to do with only console text in/out.
nextaccountic | 8 hours ago
maybe specialized calculators that ask some parameters (like "how many days" etc) and run some formulas
could even be useful for something
qingcharles | 8 hours ago
anthk | 4 hours ago
https://github.com/GReaperEx/bcg
https://github.com/John-Titor/bwbasic
anthk | 4 hours ago
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/scoundrel-ports
flomo | 7 hours ago
https://epic.org/free-prison-tablets-in-promise-and-in-pract...
jakelazaroff | 9 hours ago
I mean… yes, obviously, if you look on a computer you're gonna find software.
loneboat | 8 hours ago
dullcrisp | 7 hours ago
queenkjuul | 8 hours ago
948382828528 | 5 hours ago
tonyedgecombe | 4 hours ago
anthk | 4 hours ago
Or just give them long gamebooks -not necesarily fantasy themed- a la CYOA but with pencils and erasers (and, yes, they can be turned into a weapon, but inmates will use for paperwork or prison classes anyway).
Some of them allow you to roam under a whole city and solve enigmas/puzzles and fight.
card_zero | 26 minutes ago